Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The FILTHY Series Epilogue

Hi Everyone,As promised, I am going to post the Epilogue and Bonus scenes on my blog over the next five weeks. Today is the Epilogue. For those of you who are interested, you can purchase The Complete Serial Novel on Amazon--for just $2.99 for a few more days!-- (FREE for KU users) and have all of the scenes right now.

I watched
Faye as she ran her hand down the spine of one of her books. It was one that
sat on her bookshelf, a floor to ceiling one. She stared down at the cover with
a lost look in her eyes, as if she was somewhere far away and not here in her
apartment with me, packing up all her things.

“Are you
okay?”

She
glanced over at me quickly, almost as if she forgot I was there. She nodded
slowly. I set down the box I was about to take out to the moving truck.

“Faye.” I
touched her shoulder. She didn’t flinch, but she didn’t look up at me either.
Her gaze was focused again on the book in her hands.

“This was
my very first government book,” she said quietly. “Texas government.” She
turned the book over revealing a cowboy hat on the front—typical Texas. “It was
my first semester of college. I took this class and four others. But this class
was the first class I went to. It was on Monday and Wednesday mornings at
eight.”

“Dang, and
eight am class, those are the worst.”

She rubbed
her hands over the cover. “That’s what my aunt said, but it wasn’t. It was
wonderful. My teacher was a lady who was my age now. She was full of life and
full of love for her class, even though most anticipated it as being boring.
She made it…special.”

“Special?”
I reached out and ran my hand over the cover, wondering if it felt different
than other books, as dumb as that sounded.

“I was so
lonely and heartbroken when I started this class.”

My heart
clenched in my chest, twisting.

“I didn’t
know who I was anymore.” She glanced up at me. “But I found my way on my own.”
She didn’t look sad, but rather neutral. “This book just triggered those lost
feelings.” She moved her hand over the cover again. “I remember the first day,
sitting there with this book in front of me, scared to death. Isn’t that just
ridiculous? Of all the things that had happened to me, of all the life
experiences I had lived through, I was terrified of my first day of college.”
She giggled but the sound was thick, her eyes became glassy.

“Babe.” I
pulled her to me. Her arms wrapped around my middle. “Don’t cry.” She didn’t
say anything, but buried her face into my shoulder. My heart twisted more,
painfully threatening to rip out of my chest. “You feel the same way today.” It
was a statement, not a question. “You don’t have to move in with me. We don’t
have to do this. You can take all the time you need.” I would wait forever and
more. Faye was worth it.

“No.” She
pulled back, her eyes red and puffy. “It’s a good thing.” She wiped her eyes.
“I realized back then that it’s okay to be afraid of the good changes in my
life.” She smiled. “Moving in with you scares the shit out of me, but it’s what
I want. You’re what I want.”

My heart
thudded in my chest. But the feeling was nothing new. Faye made my heart race
every day. Every time she smiled in my direction. Every time she told me she
loved me. Every fucking day.

It had
been a year. A year since I had lifted her body off the ground at that cemetery
and carried her home. A year since she had been mine. I don’t know what changed,
what happened in the space of the hours that we were apart that day, but
something had. And Faye loved me—she really and truly loved me.

Some days
had been harder than others. Some days I could see the ache of the past in her
eyes. But unlike the past, we didn’t run from it. Not anymore. We would sit and
talk about the darkness that clouded her beautiful eyes and sometimes, only
sometimes, she needed more than that. Sometimes she needed my hate. Sometimes
she needed the pain of the past to make the future more bearable. I gave her
that.

It would
always be this way. I would always give her what she needed. No matter the
price, right down to my very soul—I’d give it all away.

“I love
you, Rhett.”

My heart
thundered in my ears as I looked down at my past, at my future, the most
beautiful woman in the world—the woman who saved me. “I love you too.”

I wasn’t
going to come here. To this place. I rarely ever came. Only once in a blue moon
if I was feeling especially bitter or sad. But I was here today. I told Rhett I
wouldn’t come. I promised him I would stay home. Even after all these years he
was afraid of how I would feel when this day came.

He was
scared I would fall apart. That I would collapse in on myself and fall into a
place where he couldn’t find me. Though part of me knew it wasn’t because he
was afraid I would collapse. He was more afraid that he would. He didn’t come
because he couldn’t deal with the reality, the truth of what the casket sinking
into the lush earth meant.

Taylor was
dead.

I expected
someone else to be here. Other people. Taylor had been someone of importance
before he had gone to prison and his life had fallen apart. He’d had friends,
extended family.

But I was
alone at the graveside service save for some cemetery employees and—

“Who is
this guy, momma?”

I glanced
down at Charlotte. My daughter. Our daughter. Rhett’s and mine. She was eight
years old now. A little blonde-haired blue-eyed thing that had wrapped her way
around my heart when Rhett and I adopted her at the age of one.

I hadn’t
wanted to be a parent, even after I married Rhett five years into our reunion.
I had told him that children were out of the question. I was afraid far too
afraid of the way a child of mine would turn out—even though they wouldn’t be
my blood child, I was still afraid. Terrified. I had been certain I would fail
them. I had failed my little boy. I’d looked at his bloody little body on a
metal tray all those years ago. I didn’t want to fail another baby, another
innocent life.

But as the
years passed something had changed inside me and when I woke up one morning in
Rhett’s arms I realized something was missing in my life. More than a year of
waiting to adopt, Charlotte came along and she became my little blessing. My
little ray of sunshine.

“He’s a man.”
My answer to her question was pathetic. This place wasn’t right for her. She
didn’t need to be here in the presence of the dead. Of the two people who had
done such horrible things to me. But my decision to come here had been last
minute, on my way home from picking Charlotte up from school.

“A dead
man?”

Charlotte’s
question drew my attention to her curly blonde head. “Yes.” I wanted to offer
her more, an explanation. But I didn’t have one that would be easy to accept
for an eight year old. I didn’t have a truth to give her that wasn’t colored
with blood and misery.

We’d
gotten there late and the small service was over. The pastor had departed just
as we walked up. The lowering machine made a squealing sound once the casket
reached the bottom. It was an awful noise, so awful that Charlotte released my
hand and grabbed her ears.

I
should’ve taken her away then. I should have led her back to the car, but I
didn’t. Instead I stood there staring at the hole in the ground. The hole
filled with Taylor. I hadn’t seen him since I’d visited him in prison nearly
twenty years ago. He would’ve been in his seventies now. Just another elderly
man who died in prison of a heart attack. That’s what the woman from the prison
told Rhett on the phone. Taylor had gone to bed two nights ago and hadn’t woken
up the next morning.

A peaceful
death, that’s what the lady from the prison had called it. Peaceful. Easy. I
couldn’t help but taste bitterness in my mouth at the news. Had I wanted Taylor
to suffer? Had I wanted him to drown in his own blood? Maybe. No. I didn’t
know, to be honest.

It just
didn’t seem fair. I had known some wonderful people over the years who had lost
their life too quickly to cancer or in an accident. People who lived out their
lives in slow painful misery. Taylor hadn’t. He had been fine. Normal. He’d
died in his sleep.

For a
moment, just one simple moment, I had the urge to jump in that hole that would
be his home for the rest of his life and rip the lid open. I wanted to shake
his dead body until he felt all the pain. Until he knew all the ways I’d
suffered all these years. Even with Rhett’s love, with his patience, with his
kindness, with all the ways Rhett was the most wonderful man, I was still
fucked up from all the things Taylor had done to me.

“Was he a
bad man, mommy?” Charlotte’s words made me flinch, drawing me away from the
crazy desire that burned through my veins.

“Why?” I
whispered.

“You don’t
seem happy or sad about him dying. You seem mad.”

I blinked
down at her, at my perceptive little girl. She picked up on the most subtle
things. She was only eight, but I was certain she knew there was something
wrong with me—that there was a darkness inside me. A darkness that even her
daddy couldn’t reach sometimes.

“He wasn’t
a good person, Charlotte.” I crouched down next to her.

“Why not?”

I took a
deep breath, sucking in the scent of freshly mowed grass. “Maybe I’ll tell you
about him one day.”

She
glanced back at the hole where a Bobcat machine was shoveling dirt on top of
Taylor’s casket. “You promise?”

“I—”

“Faye.”
Rhett’s voice brought me back to my feet. Guilt shuddered through me. Guilt for
not telling him I was coming here. I turned slowly as he came to stand next to
me. Even though he was in his fifties now, he didn’t look it. Not by a long
shot. Only a little bit of salt gray flecked along his temples.

“Hi, baby.
I didn’t expect to see y’all here.” He directed his words at me, his eyes full
of questions.

“I didn’t
expect to see you here, either.”

He nodded
slowly. “I wasn’t going to come—”

“Neither
was I,” I interjected.

A strained
smile spread across his lips. I knew what that meant. I knew the reality of
this. Taylor was his father—a shitty horrible father, but in the end he was
still his dad. And sometimes death brought on ache people never thought they
would have, even about the people they hated.

I reached
out and took his hand in mine. Our fingers slipped together easily, like puzzle
pieces fitting together, finding home. A sense of ease slipped over me. Rhett
had a way of calming me with just the brush of his fingertips.

“He’s
really gone,” Rhett said quietly.

I nodded
slowly, my gaze focused on the nearly full grave.

“I always
imagined how I would feel when this happened.”

I glanced
at him. “Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Is it
like you thought it would be?”

“No.” He
shook his head. “I expected to feel nothing. But that’s not what I feel.”

“Do you
feel sad, daddy?” Charlotte fiddled with the ends of her hair with her free
hand.

A small
smile spread across his lips. “A little.”

“Mommy
said she would tell me about the man one day.”

Rhett
glanced over at me, surprise on his face.

I
shrugged. “Maybe when she’s old enough.” In a backward way I knew that without
Taylor I wouldn’t have adopted Charlotte.

“Maybe,”
he said reluctantly.

“We’ll go
and let you have your time.” I knew it was what he needed, to say goodbye to
the man who had shaped his life as much as he had shaped mine.

Charlotte
slipped her hand in mine after saying goodbye to her dad. We walked back to the
car, but before I climbed in, I looked back at Rhett. He stood just before
Taylor’s and my mother’s graves. The hole was completely filled in now.

Rhett’s
hands were clasped behind his back and even from the distance I could see the
movement, the swipe of his thumb over the other. His nervous twitch. I
remembered being not too far from there in this same cemetery decades ago with
Rhett. With the swipe of his thumb over the other on the day my mother was
buried just next his father.

I thought
about how far we’d come since that day so long ago. About all the hardships,
the fights, the love.

“Mommy,
are you ready?”

A smile
spread across my lips. “Yes, baby.”

And as I
drove home, to our home, Rhett’s and mine. I looked at his image fading in my
rearview mirror and listened to Charlotte chatter about her day, and I was
thankful. Thankful for all the endings that led to new beginnings.